Orchestra with a bloody past now makes beautiful music [video]

At first glance, Pedro Reyes and company’s rendition of “Imagine” is most interesting for its use of homemade instruments, but when you realize Reyes is a Mexico City artist who constructed the entire orchestra out of confiscated weapons, the piece takes on a whole new dimension.

“The task was challenging but they succeeded in extracting sounds,” Reyes writes on his website. “It’s difficult to explain but the transformation was more than physical. It’s important to consider that many lives were taken with these weapons; as if a sort of exorcism was taking place the music expelled the demons they held, as well as being a requiem for lives lost.”